1/20/2007

I went off on my own after a while, trying to find gang members. Call me naive, but I wanted to see what they had to say about race relations, what sucked them into gang life, what might get them out and why they thought it was OK to cordon off sections of the city for their exclusive use.

I had no luck in the end . . .

This isn’t where I all you naive, Steve. This is where I make fun of you.

First of all, it’s tough finding gang members in Los Angeles, to be sure. L.A. has only 39,000 or so, and they’re tough to spot.

Second, I’m sure that gang members would love to have a nice little polite chat with Steve Lopez — if only he could find one.

I’ve never met Lopez and have no idea what he sounds like, but it amuses me to picture him talking to the gang members in a voice resembling that of Professor Frink from the Simpsons:

“If you don’t have a job for them, it’s over,” [Connie] Rice said about what happens if you’re lucky enough to talk a kid out of a gang. “[Father] Greg Boyle is right. The only factor that has ever substantially reduced crime by gangs is jobs.”

She had a thought too on how to create them.

“You need a Manhattan Project to create violence-reduction jobs like the public works jobs from World War II,” she said, telling me Los Angeles has arrested 450,000 minors in the last 10 years and sent many of them off to prisons at tremendous public expense. “You create jobs because it’s a whole lot cheaper than what we’re doing now.”

And then all you have to do is get them to the jobs every day, on time, and make sure they do some work while they’re there.

Here’s how it works in Bush’s United $tates: We hire the illegal aliens who gladly slave away for beans while our good citizens’ pay erodes via an oversupply of workers and the effects of inflation with stagnant wages. Sure, flood the market with cheap labor and it makes everyone happy – except of course those who do the labor. Then complain when the crime rate goes up.

Many have gone into identity theft…they pay homeless people or drug addicts per bagful of stolen mail. They have their “clean” girlfriends get jobs in retail or as medical receiptionists or even in court clerk offices so they have access to all sorts of valuable information.

If Steve Lopez “can’t find” any gang members, I recommend he go over to the Mayor’s office where he can speak to Tony Villar—er, I mean, “Antonio Villaraigosa,”—after all, I understand ol’ Tony used to run with gang members back in the day.

(This post was going to be way more impolite than it is, but I have enough respect for the general content of YOUR posts to wash the gasoline off the bridge; feel free to explain, then, what you mean).

It’s not some broad category of “other commenters” that I attack with irrelevant spelling-bee bullshit; it’s just kagu. HE makes no attempt to be polite, or relevant, or objective, or coherent…yet I’m the one you accuse of wasting bandwidth.

It’s kagu’s commenting style, Leviticus. Have you ever read Ross H. Spencer’s “Purdue” stories? On the substance of his comment, he made a lot of points that I could see. Tookie Williams (Crip or Blood?) was just executed. If Mr. Lopez wants to find gang-members, maybe he should look in the jails and prisons, or; the Crips and Bloods have been around for about three generations now just waiting for Mr. Lopez to discover them (sarcasm), or; Liberal icons like Clinton and Gore really solved the gang problem (not) with midnight basketball; etc., etc., etc..

In any case, I’m sorry that I hurt your feelings young one. I think. Although I oppose corporal punishment I do think that the kind teacher may sometimes be the bad teacher. Lessons learned hard are lessons remembered. You may feel that it’s none of my business to teach you anything but … remember … “It Takes A Village”. 😉

Even if you give him the benefit of the doubt, you have to use a hell of a lot of inference to take any meaning at all from that post. Did he mention that Lopez ought to look for gang members in prison? No. You did. Because YOU are smart and are attributing YOUR insight to his mind-puke.

Like I said, nk, I have a lot of respect for you. Could you explain the following for me (I’m not saying that their isn’t an explanation for it, just that I don’t know it; As is common knowledge at this point, I’m not really old enough to remember the nitty-gritty of Clinton’s presidency)?

“…remember BILL CLINTONS silly idea of MIDNIGHT BASKETBALL and any athete knows the impertence of good bed rest”

-krazy kagu

Finally, there are several conservatives on this sight who dismiss many (admittedly tired) rants from the left with “The Angry Left, everyone”. Patterico himself attacks individuals (m.croche, anyone?) for being stupid, or for missing the point of a post.

(By the way, I don’t blame Patterico for getting snippy with these commenters, because they invariably attack HIM, not his positions, first [which is stupid])

What I’m saying is that my comments regarding kagu are nothing more than a more verbose, more interesting way of saying “The Angry Right, everyone”. It’s the same sort of dismissal. I don’t hate kagu. I just don’t take him seriously. He apparently doesn’t either, or he’d stick around and debate me when I challenge the merit of his positions.

Thanks for explaining yourself. Like I said, lots of respect from my side of the aisle.

“…remember BILL CLINTONS silly idea of MIDNIGHT BASKETBALL and any athete knows the impertence of good bed rest”

-krazy kagu

As best as I remember, it was a federally-funded program to take kids off the street by yes, actually, honest-to-goodness, bringing them into gyms and having them play basketball, not necessarily at midnight but certainly at a time when they should be sleeping after having done their homework. For some reason, I associate then VP Al Gore with it more than President Clinton. Perhaps he was out in public promoting it or was put in charge of administering it?

Ross H. Spencer’s “Chance Purdue” stories are an undiscovered treasure trove of literary masterpieces hilarious parodies of private detective stories. I don’t know whether they are in bookstores but they are available through Amazon. They take place in Chicago’s Logan Square.

(You might find me as a walk-on character, who sold Chance a carton of bent Camels, in one of the books. I worked my way through college and first-year law school running, respectively, a bookstore, tobacco shop and subway kiosk in Logan Square. But that’s just my conceit.)

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